At some point, there is going to be a post-analysis done on how the Leafs decided to build their current group and it's just going to highlight the stubbornness of a GM who caved to his star players' contract demands and handicapped the team for years to come.

I get that they have a cap guru that's helping them find loopholes here and there but that's really just shuffling deckchairs and not addressing the true problem. The team has to operate on zero injury margins and keeps shedding any kind of secondary talent each season.

In order to keep the 4 guys taking up half their cap allocation, they've had to dump Kapanan, Kadri, Connor Brown, Johnsson and soon Hyman and all they can do to cover for this is bring in players at the end of their career willing to sign for league minimum.

They're in a situation now where they are unable to even dress their starting goalie once he's healthy because they have no ability to remove him from LTIR until the playoffs start. Like they chose to do that.

This situation would be somewhat mitigated by the Leafs being able to dress some above Replacement level players on their ELC's but they haven't drafted for shit since 2016 and there's no one on the team younger than Matthews who was drafted 5 years ago.